Top 102 Quotes & Sayings by Andrew Young - Page 2

In a sane, civil, intelligent and moral society, you don't blame poor people for being poor.

I think we've made tremendous progress on racism. We've even made progress on war. We've made almost no progress on poverty.

It stands to reason that unloved and unwanted children are going to get into crime.

Slavery didn't break up the black families as much as liberal welfare rules.

There is no safer place to put your money than in the middle of the U.S.

If I hadn't been so outspoken, Jimmy Carter wouldn't have wanted me.

Most of my teachers wanted to send me to the principal's office. But my fourth-grade teacher once put her arms around me and said, 'You sure write well.' And I've had good penmanship until this day. She was the only one who ever said anything nice to me. That's the kind of motivation that students need.

Egypt's problem is that you've got an economy that works for about 40 million people, only you have 90 million people. The answer to the Egyptian problem is not guns, but jobs. We've got to find a private-sector, nongovernmental, aggressive way of creating jobs. That's not America's role totally.

There were lots of smart black people at Harvard before Barack Obama, but none of them ever got to head up the law review. There has been a history of discrimination.

When people ask where I studied to be an ambassador, I say my neighborhood and my school. I've tried to tell my kids that you don't wait until you're in high school or college to start dealing with problems of people being different. The younger you start, the better.

Everybody in America has been dependent on the government at some time. We owe everybody in America the right to vote and access to capital. What I say is, let's make America work, let's make democracy and free enterprise work for everybody.

We've changed in the sense that we flipped - and this is no longer the Republican party of Lincoln. This is the party of suppression.

When I took the SAT, I didn't get accepted into a single white school that I applied to. Now I've got honorary degrees from a lot of those schools that rejected me. Things are different now, but not that much different.

Any racial reconciliation we've had in this country has come not out of confrontation but out of a spirit of reconciliation. If we continue to practice an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, we'll eventually end up with a land of people who are blind and toothless.

We were trying to transform America, not triumph over white folk.

The Soviet Union is going to have a human-rights explosion. You'll have hundreds of thousands of dissidents.

There is a happy land, Far, far away, Where Saints in glory stand, Bright, bright as day.

My solutions are to include Africa in the global economy, and not African charity, AIDS research, but African infrastructure development. And I think that Africa can import and needs everything the whole world can manufacture. And they have got enough money to pay for it. It's just that the money is in the ground.

I would define morality as enlightened self-interest...That old Platonic ideal that there are certain pure moral forms just isn't where we are.

You have to expect that if you cuss out the world, The world is going to cuss back.

I always quoted to my parents from Kahlil Gibran, "The Prophet." Your children are not your children. They come through you, but not from you. You can give them your love, but not your thoughts, for they come from a land that you cannot enter, not even in your wildest dreams.

When the long, varnished buds of beech Point out beyond their reach, And tanned by summer suns Leaves of bright bryony turn bronze, And gossamer floats bright and wet From trees that are their own sunset, Spring, summer, autumn I come here, And what is there to fear? And yet I never lose the feeling That someone else behind is stealing Or else in front has disappeared; Though nothing I have seen or heard, Makes me still walk beneath these boughs With cautious step as in a haunted house.

No nation as rich as ours should have so many people isolated on islands of poverty in such a sea of material wealth.

I call upon both Republicans and Democrats to work with us to have a national ID card that is free and accessible. President Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King recognized was the greatest step for society was that short step into the voting booth. If we are to be true to their courage and conviction, we must make that short step as easy as possible. Surely, if we can land a spaceship on Mars, we can certainly put a voter ID card in the hand of every eligible voter.

Can wealth give happiness? look around and see, what gay distress! what splendid misery! Whatever fortunes lavishly can pour, the mind annihilates and calls for more.

Martin Luther King was talking about racism, war and poverty. I think we have made progress enormous progress in racism and war, but we have made little or no progress in poverty. And it's because the economy has gotten more and more complex as we have globalized.

Once the Xerox copier was invented, private diplomacy died. There's no such thing as secrecy. It's just a question of whether it's leaked or revealed openly.

Slavery didnt break up the black families as much as liberal welfare rules.

Bill [Clinton] is every bit as black as Barack. He's probably gone with more black women than Barack.

Beauty and love are all my dream; They change not with the changing day; Love stays forever like a stream That flows but never flows away.

The man with courage is a majority.

Nobody Black had learned anything from the `Letter from the Birmingham Jail' or from the `I Have a Dream' speech. That was a revelation of white people.

More and more I find I'm really impressed with how much my son knows and how much he thinks like me. But he never would agree with me and he never would listen to me on anything.

Martin Luther King said America had given a bad check to black people.

Both the brightness and the spectrum of the X-rays are very different from what theory predicts.

There is a sense in which the United States Ambassador speaks to the United States, as well as for the United States. I have always seen my role as a thermostat, rather than a thermometer. So I'm going to be actively working... for my own concerns. I have always had people advise me on what to say, but never on what not to say.

Influence is like a savings account, the less you use it, the more you've got

Nike has always been a business about excellence and achievement.

He [Martin Luther King Jr.] always used to say you have no choice about being born or dying. The only thing you have a choice about is what you die for.

If all I get is a little controversy for speaking the truth, if I did less, I would not be worth living.

My daddy was determined to make me a dentist and a baseball player. And I loved my daddy but I wasted four years of college trying to do what he wanted me to do, and not what I felt I wanted to do.

I had to get a second passport in a hurry.